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I asked Peter Alexander, Assistant Secretary at AGIMO (Australian Government Information Management Office) about the future of the data.gov.au data portal used to supply data the MashupAustralia competition. This portal also has the url data.australia.gov.au.

I’m speaking on data portals and lessons learned from around the world on Wednesday afternoon in the government 2.0 spatial@gov conference.

The data.gov.au beta portal will be replaced by a production version next month, hosted in the cloud. First priority is discoverability because it doesn’t matter how good it is if you cannot find it.

Second priority is format. The philosophy is to go with whatever is possible (it may be a table in a pdf initially), then improve on it e.g. with web services. AGIMO will be working very hard with agencies to get their data published. Agencies are a lot more comfortable about sharing now they know the sky did not fall with Mashup Australia, on the contrary they saw the benefits.

Agencies will self publish. There will be 5-10 attributes for every dataset, then links through to specialist portals for statistical or geospatial data (eg. Geoscience Australia). These will have more and different metadata.

We agreed on the importance of resourcing the admin, blog etc. But there will be a ‘lag response policy’. If you jump in straight away with an answer it can kill the conversation. Better to encourage comments on comments and let conversation blossom. That’s an interesting take.

Peter has had some discussions with ANZLIC and states. The same technology platform can be used by states.